Saturday, August 4, 2007

Baby Steps...

The article inches slowly but ever closer to completion. I keep typing things in italics like "This sucks and needs to be rewritten" or "Do you really need this sentence?" But, I continue to pull at the plow.

I'm also beginning the reading for my classes, which start later this month (*gasp!* - so early!). Most of the first month or even two of this semester is stuff I've taught many times before (various medieval texts). But in one of the classes I'm beginning with a certain now canonical early feminist text and then using that as a segue into the medieval material. It's been years since I first read this canonical early 20c. text and I forgot how much I like it.

Had a lovely time with my aunt last night - she stayed until around midnight talking about all kinds of things. My uncle died a year ago and her only child lives far away across the country with his new family. She's been feeling very alone and it's so good to get together once a week or so - for both of us. When Medieval Mom comes for a visit this next week, we're going to go visit Medieval Aunt as well - even though she's my father's sister and they divorced in '83, my aunt used to live with my parents in the late 60s and they were very close. So, it will be a fun reunion.

TD also comes in two days for a visit - I'm completely overjoyed! Tonight, though, I go out with several colleagues to celebrate one of them reaching a big career publishing milestone. Fun! Busy, busy....

Good luck with the inching along! I cleaned house instead of inched (how would one change that for tenses, anyway?) today.

I love that canonical text too, but I actually found it hard to teach. I didn't have much to say except "I like it; I agree with this." and my students all claimed to understand and agree with what it said too, so then we were all left staring at each other.

Of course, you might get some mileage out of "what the heck is this doing in this course?" But the students in my class were surprisingly willing to concede that women were, in fact, people.

HI, yeah, I taught it before - this past year. The students liked it a lot, as did Sisyphus'. I was teaching it in a theory course, and I talked a fair bit about the ways she made theoretical interventions using literary techniques. I.e. the scene where she is describing what thinking is like, as she watches the water. And I tried to foreground it as materialist theory. That's all I really remember, for some reason! There was some discussion, generated by them, about whether/how W was classist and disconnected from the reality of women's lives. Some of which was semi-valid, but most of which shows that they didn't quite get her point!!

"It was lying on a butcher's block, not crying, although there was snow, but warm and chuckling under a comforter of stray cats. They were all purring together, and the sound was heavy with knowledge. I stood by the strange cradle for a long time, pondering while the snow fell and the cats purred prophecy."